Grove

^{review by Alapai}

Grove is a solitaire card game from Giga Mech Games. In it, you put together an orchard of various fruit trees, trying to collect as much fruit as possible.

In Grove, there are 18 cards, which you use 9 of for any given game (the rules mention you can use the 9 cards you set aside as the cards for your next game). Each card has 5 fruit trees and one blank space on it in a 2x3 formation. You start the game with one card out and two cards in hand. Your turn works by playing one of your two cards onto the table, overlapping what is already there. You have restrictions when playing your card. Any trees on the card you play have to either overlap a tree of the same color or a blank space. If they do match a tree below, you place a die on that space with its number being the total amount of fruit between the trees (aka placing a lemon tree with 1 lemon on top of a lemon tree with 2 lemons has you place a yellow die showing 3). If there was already a die there, you just add on the value of the fruit from the card you played (aka placing a lemon tree with 1 lemon on top of a space with a yellow die with a 3 has you move the die to a 4), although if you add to a card with a value of 6, you turn the die to the wheelbarrow space which is worth 10 points at the end of the game. After playing your card and placing dice, you draw a new card. Once you’ve played all the cards, you add up the total values of the dice on cards to determine your score.

In addition to the regular game, there are also recipe challenges on the backs of the cards that give you additional conditions to achieve that you can challenge yourself with. When using the recipes, you use two randomly, allowing for plenty of different challenges.

Grove is a very simple, very short game. Once you understand how it works, it only takes ~10 minutes to play. When would you play it? Well, there are some solitaire games that I recommend for when you want to play a full board game, but have nobody else around. These are full-on board games that either have a solid solo mode or games specifically designed for solo play that have a lot of gameplay. Grove is not one of those games. Grove is a game that you can put into a pocket or throw into your bag and just whip out when you have a short break and want to play a physical game. Or maybe you’re playing a game with player elimination and got eliminated first. Then, you can play a game of Grove while waiting for other players to be eliminated so you can start again. Or you’ve finished a longer board game and people want a break before starting up another longer board game, so you can just play a short game of Grove while other people take their break. Grove is great as a small filler game. It’s very compact in both how much space it takes up when traveling as well as table space, so you don’t need much space to carry or play it.

If you’re looking for a short, compact solo game, then Grove is a great choice that provides some simple challenges, but is fun to play through to see how high you can score.

Grove is available now from our webstore.